Firefox 3 news, comments and tips

This is mostly old news but I’ve been so busy with other things lately I never got around to publishing this. Now that I’ve got some time I figured I should post this even though it may be old news to my one or two regular readers. 😉

Firefox has officially set the Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours, read about it at the Spread Firefox Download Day 2008 page. The record now stands at just over 8 million downloads and as of this writing the total download count is over 28 million.

I am very pleased with the latest release of my favorite browser, it feels quicker and according to process explorer it now has the same memory usage as IE7 (~20M). The Firefox team has managed to plug the memory leaks while reducing the base memory footprint.

Only one of my essential add-on’s, Copy Plain Text, hasn’t been updated for Firefox 3 yet. So I went to the all versions page and downloaded the v 0.3.3 installer by right clicking the button and choosing “Save Link As …”. But when I tried to install it I saw:

“Copy Plain Text” will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates

On the add-on’s reviews page Firefox user ervee posted a link to a pre-modified version for those who don’t want to hack the installer. Of course I just had to be a geek and roll my own so, I headed over to the the Mozilla Wiki to read about the new add-on security system. It turns out to be easy to patch the installer for this too. The warning is do to the update source not being an SSL server (HTTPS). I simply removed the update source and it installed fine.

I have also started using a couple new extensions, Interclue and Foxmarks both are very handy and Foxmarks is a perfect example of using cloud computing for convenience in a safe way (you have copies of all data locally as well as in the cloud).

A good tip for increasing your privacy on the web without major inconvenience is to disable third party cookies. You’ll find this option in Tools-Options-Privacy of Firefox, simply uncheck the “Accept third-party cookies” checkbox. You may need to add exceptions for some web sites/services. So far I have only needed to add one exception, Foxmarks.com.

Finally some fun Firefox stuff, to see the latest chapter and verse from The Book of Mozilla enter about:mozilla in the address bar. There is also a new Easter Egg in Firefox 3 check it out by entering about:robots in the address bar.